<p>ellemenope--I think the point was that the Spanish and Jazz lowered the ranking because they were unweighted. His high school included them in the ranking is how I read it, and it affected his ranking adversely, because they were lower weight. His ranking would be higher if they were not included at all--maybe an argument can be made that he should have recalculated the ranking based on not including them, instead of weighting them more heavily--but his rank would still jump up significantly if he simply eliminated them from consideration, yes? Or am I misreading this?</p>
<p>Not sure about your argument that high level music and language classes are "not academic." Guess I would disagree with that. Colleges, including Stanford, offer majors in these "non-academic" subjects, after all.</p>